Customer retention challenges affect all service businesses at one point or another. Customers move on for a number of reasons, including finding better pricing or having a bad experience with your company. But by reframing challenges as competitive advantages to improve retention, you can:
Increase profits by 25-95%
Reduce business costs by 5x
Improve topline sales by 40% or more
In a recent Aspire webinar, Aspire Senior Customer Success Manager Emily Nickel shares strategies to improve customer retention and scale operational efficiencies that drive long-term success.
The webinar covers:
2025 industry insights and challenges
Winning ideal new business
Locking in lifelong customer retention
2025 industry insights and challenges
To shed light on industry trends, Aspire partnered with Thrive Analytics to survey over 1,000 commercial cleaning companies nationwide. The survey was conducted from Sept. 19-Oct. 4, 2024.
“Current revenue breakdown shows that over half (53%) of reported revenue comes from ongoing work, and repeat customers make up 40% of sales for your commercial cleaners,” Nickel says. “This proves that long-term relationships are the key to success in this industry.”
When asked to rank their top 2025 business goals, respondents’ top three goals were:
Acquiring new customers
Driving revenue growth
Improving cash flow
The top reported challenges are workforce management and customer retention.
“And interestingly enough, the strategic initiatives that have the greatest focus by your counterparts are recruitment efforts, employee training programs, and new software adoption,” Nickel says.
The cost of acquiring new customers
“We just saw that customer retention was the second-most reported critical business challenge. So does this mean you just invest more into your team to go after brand new customers?” Nickel asks.
Maybe not. Though acquiring new customers was listed as a top goal by the majority of survey respondents, customer acquisition comes with high costs. Harvard Business Review data shows:
Acquiring a new customer can cost 5x more than retaining an existing customer.
Increasing customer retention by 5% can increase profits by 25%-95%.
The success rate of selling to an existing customer is 60%-70%, while the success rate of selling to a new customer is only 5%-20%.
“Retained customers spend more, cost less to serve, and often become brand advocates driving customer acquisition through word-of-mouth marketing,” Nickel says.
Even though customer retention ranked No. 5 in survey respondents’ top goals, Nickel notes focusing on customer retention would help achieve the goals that were ranked higher.
“Happy customers will provide great referrals and testimonials and drive new business for you by word of mouth, which equates to you acquiring new customers,” she says. “Existing customers already know your stellar service and support more attainable revenue increases for your business. So, if you also have ‘grow revenue’ as your No. 2 goal, as our survey said, consider customer retention as the most effective vehicle to get there.”
Existing customers also drive reliable cash flow.
“You've gone through the hard work of training them on your invoice timing, invoice structure, and payment expectations, all of which drive that reliable cash flow,” Nickel says. “Existing customers, regular schedules, and steady cash flow all equal reliable paychecks for your employees and also all lead to employee stability [No. 4 goal] and competence in their jobs, which can drive job satisfaction.”
Modern companies need modern solutions
45% of companies report relying on five to seven software applications, with payroll processing, accounting, and invoicing being the most popular.
25% of those surveyed identified lagging digital transformation as a significant business risk, highlighting the need for industry-specific solutions.
“There's mounting pressure from labor shortages, rising customer expectations, and new technological demands reshaping how successful cleaning companies must operate,” Nickel says. “Today's cleaning companies must balance time-tested service excellence with modern operational demands. You need modern solutions to streamline your operations and enhance efficiency in today's competitive market.”
Siloed solutions can create inefficiencies, reduce data accuracy, and slow growth.
“Only tailored solutions designed for commercial cleaning contractors can deliver all those integrated solutions that drive success while minimizing that operational disruption,” Nickel says. “Aspire is an end-to-end business management software that connects all your processes into a streamlined solution.”
Winning ideal new business
While acquiring customers matters, it’s important to remember the saying, “work smarter, not harder.” You want to onboard your ideal customer, someone who cares about the value of your services, not just the lowest price point.
Determine your ideal client profile (ICP), and go after those customers.
“HubSpot quotes that ‘organizations with a strong ideal client profile achieve 68% higher win rates,’” Nickel says. “Using historical data and feedback from your employees, you should be able to determine your ICP.”
Once you have an ICP, ask yourself these three questions when bidding new work:
Are you going after the right customers?
Do you have the right processes in place for this customer type?
Are you pricing this customer correctly?
“Your ICP should target customers seeking your top-performing and profitable service lines,” Nickel says. “Aspire has real-time job cost reporting that allows you to view endless sets of job performance data, such as labor hours efficiency, labor cost efficiency, and even drive time versus onsite percentages.”
Utilize technology to drive your ideal customer to your door. Nickel shares two solutions for inbound and outbound sales:
Inbound: Scorpion’s RevenueMAX uses data from every website conversion to make each interaction better for your potential customers. It records and analyzes each lead to uncover key patterns and trends. It also provides a full view of your marketing return on investment with insights into the customers, geographies, and channels that garner the best results.
“RevenueMAX is going to train each channel, like Google, Bing, etc., to bring you more revenue at a better return,” Nickel says.
Outbound: Convex provides a map that shows localized target areas with building prospects, such as square footage, property type, onsite customers, and more. It uses AI to search social media and online listings for facility contact information by title.
“These localized maps drive prospecting that’s going to minimize travel time and indirect costs, which is going to assist you with prospecting that could raise your bottom line,” Nickel says. “Convex can upload a file of your customers so current clients will display in green on the map, and prospects will show in blue, so you can target prospects in areas where you're already doing well.”
Use the prospect contacts you find in Convex to set up bulk email campaigns. Or automate direct campaigns via Aspire’s Marketing Pro integration platform.
“Aspire allows you to configure multiple fields to tag and label your contacts with contact types such as prospect or temperature of the lead, industry lead source, and more,” Nickel says. “So this is going to allow you to drive really specialized customized outreach campaigns.”
Locking in lifelong customer retention
To analyze customer retention, you need to understand customer churn. Churn is a metric that measures the percentage of customers who stop doing business with a company in a particular period. Companies that price products or services on a monthly basis should review churn monthly as well.
“Many executives prefer to monitor and report churn rate’s opposite, which is retention rate or how many customers stay,” Nickel says. “The ultimate goal is understanding how many customers leave and the underlying reasons why they're ending their relationship with you.”
Nickel recommends setting a monthly goal for retention or churn rate.
“This way, you can build your sales goals around what you may need to backfill,” she says. “It’s a very motivating factor for sales reps to minimize the difficult, time-consuming new sales by maximizing their retention.”
Review this information with your team regularly and ask the following questions:
Does the customer have a good reason to be unhappy? If so, why?
What could the company have done to improve service to this customer?
What can we learn from this to improve our customer service?
What could the person dealing with this customer have done better?
If you had been this customer, what would you have done?
“As you're locking in a new customer deal, as well as ongoing for customer retention, remember to perform regular assessments to ensure you understand your customer,” Nickel says.
Customer audits can be broken down into four steps:
Ask, what does your customer want? Consider why they hired you in the first place and how you’re different or better than their prior provider.
Set expectations. What mistakes have you made, and how did you resolve them? How has the customer reacted to your resolutions?
Follow through. Have your account managers self-reflect on how they have followed through on commitments. Create an open, honest environment so they're comfortable finding a solution with you.
Last but not least, communicate effectively.
“Facilitating easy communication, resolving issues quickly, and ensuring you're consistently meeting their expectations are key to retaining customers and opening new opportunities for your business,” Nickel says. “Rather than relying on phone calls, which can be easily forgotten during a busy day, or paper notes, which can be lost, utilize technology to streamline your internal communication and offer swift resolution.”
Issue management
Aspire offers a built-in issue management feature with three-way communication of issues between field employees, management, and your customer, which ultimately enables transparency in communicating with your clients and reassures customers that their needs or concerns will be heard and properly handled.
Customer reporting allows you to stay on track of your open issues, keep track of your progress toward resolution, and ensure no issues fall through the cracks.
Site audits and inspections
“Regardless of issues popping up, remember to conduct regular property inspections to ensure the quality of work or uncover potential revenue opportunities,” Nickel says. “Many customers have come to expect this. Set mutual expectations at the beginning of your relationship and throughout to determine the best frequency for performing and providing inspection reports.”
Aspire provides site audit functionality you can customize based on your different properties and scope of services. You can easily share the results with a customer via an email or principal site audit report.
“I recently had an Aspire customer tell me that regularly sending site inspections has saved more than one contract because you're showing customers your job performance throughout the contract term,” Nickel says. “It prevents the customer from unreasonably surprising you at the end of the term with false claims of performance issues. Get those site inspections signed off by your customer for that very reason.”
Multithreading
Multithreading is building relationships with multiple decision-makers throughout an organization.
“Contact change is one of the biggest risks to losing an account,” Nickel says. “During site visits, make sure to build relationships with multiple managers and leaders of the company to solidify your position.”
Constant customer communication
Customers are not just about sales and revenue. Nurture the relationship with regular communication, whether via site inspections, customer newsletters, or regular surveys.
“When you were in the sales process, you likely showcased all of your cutting-edge differentiators,” Nickel says. “Customers do not have the brain of an elephant, and they forget why they chose you above all your competition. So it's on you to remind them, drive your brand recognition so prospects seek you out and customers will never want to leave.”
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